A Man Out Of Time

The first report came from the radio from ABS (Anambra Broadcasting Station).

“There has been a sighting of a strange man at the far end of Line 3 in Onitsha Main Market. Eyewitnesses said the man came out of nowhere, speaking in a strange language and attempting to pay for goods with what appeared to be an old, unrecognisable coin. The Onitsha Divisional Police had been alerted, and they will arrive soon. We will bring you more as the story develops.”

The broadcaster moved on to the weather. Yadili turned down the volume of the radio. She was three chapters into reading a new manuscript she had come across on the tonal drift in South Eastern Igbo dialects. She had ignored three calls from her mother and two from her Head of Department that morning. She had a deadline to meet with the manuscript and her thesis, and her cup of Bournvita on the table was already going cold fast.

Unknown.

She pulled off the cap of her pen and scribbled some words in her notebook, trying to concentrate.  

In over ten years of studying language, eight of them in the field, hopping on boats to creeks  in hidden villages looking for dialects to preserve, she had uncovered so many unknowns.

This one unsettled her. The coin and the language. She waved her pen in the air, trying to put two and two together.

She had to get to the bottom of this. She was already standing, grabbing her recorder from the shelf above her desk and her keys. She was out the door before the newscaster finished reporting on the traffic situation that evening.

Onitsha, in 2050, had been given a good facelift by the government, but the shadow of the old edifices still loomed over the boisterous, colourful market. There were now sophisticated, elevated pedestrian rails with escalators running above the traffic. The bridge that had once caused tight gridlocks now carried a straight rail line, its sleek trains running on schedule every eight minutes between Onitsha, Owerri, and Asaba, cutting journeys from hours to minutes.

By the time Yadili had parked her car at the edge of the road and pushed her way through the crowd, the news had been fractured like every other news in Nigeria into three  different parts:  the man was a mad man from Aba, the man was a scammer who wanted to dupe the market woman with his fake currency, he was probably part of an armed robbery or kidnapping chain looking for who to take and demand ransom from. She moved through the commotion, the smell of the peppers and spices and other people who had gathered, towards the parts where the crowd thickened. A group of fifty or sixty people who had abandoned their wares had already formed a half circle surrounding someone she had not yet seen.

In the centre of the circle stood the man.

He was striking, strangely. He was not tall, but he held his head in the posture of someone who didn’t know what it was to shrink himself for anyone. His skin was the colour of the deep brown sand watered by the night rain. His clothing was not anything hanging in the stores or boutiques in the present generation. The long tunic of intricately dyed cloth bound at the waist with a braided gold thread wasn’t the trend in 2050. Yadili could not make out the particular brand of the sandals he wore. He looked like he had dropped out of the pages of an ancient royal history book. In his hands, he was still holding out the strange-looking coin he had tried to give a bewildered trader.

“Kwụọ. Ti-nma ọbọchi. Ọnana - Nimrodu-ilu. Grụọ ana ụlọchi.”

Everyone in the crowd held their breath. Who was this man, and what was he saying?

“When is the police coming?”  someone asked.

But the words rang in Yadili’s ears. She had come across those words before in a text during her research.

“Wait,” she said, pushing through.

She stood in front of the man and looked directly into his eyes. His light-green eyes were fever-bright and held a confused stare.

She held out her palm.  He looked at her palm, and then at her.

She pointed to herself.

“Yadili.”

His eyes brightened as he felt seen, finally. He understood she was introducing herself.

He raised his hand put it on his chest.

“Onene, Nimrodi-ilu.” He introduced himself.

She took his hand and led him through the crowd, towards the edge of the market, despite the protests of the market people lying that she worked with the Police Intelligence Department. In the car, she dialled the number of her Department Head, Dr Duru.

“Yadili, I have been trying to reach you all day.”

“I am so sorry, sir, I have been quite busy, but you have to come to the department today. I found something strange. A man called Nimrodi.” She took a glimpse at the strange man. “I think he speaks Thrukn.”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Yadili, please say that again.”

“I think he is speaking Thrukn, a primordial language, thought to be lost for so many years. I sent you a deciphered text a few weeks ago, three pages from the new archive we discovered online. He is using the same consonant clusters and identical Verb-Object-Subject syntax. Sir, this is neither a dialect nor a creole. This is the source language.”

There was another uncomfortable silence.

“Where are you now?”

“I am on my way to the department. I told the market people that I was part of the Police Intelligence to get him out.”

“Yadili...”

“I know, I was being spontaneous as always, but we need him.” She stressed the ‘need’. “I will explain everything when you come.”

He exhaled tiredly.

“I will be there in twenty minutes.”

She ended the call and turned to the man again. He looked more settled than before, staring out the window at the light rail, his hands still wrapped around the coin he refused to let go.

She was a Senior Research Assistant at the Department of Linguistics and African Language Studies at the New African University. She worked across language preservation and historical studies, finding dialects that were dying, and recording them before the last speaker left.

This was what drew her to the three misfiled pages in the NAU digital archive a few months ago. She had been searching the database at two in the morning when the search algorithm brought her to something she couldn’t recognise. Unclassified: Originata: Unverified Pre-historical Words. There was no author, date, or institution.

She had opened them expecting a familiar mislabelled Ijaw text or a poorly translated Edo dialect. What she found would take a huge chunk of her time in the coming weeks, and she tried to make sense of breaking the bones of the words and letter clusters, transcribing them, and turning them into something recognisable. These were grammar and words that predated every grammatical record she could reference, which, when even scrambled, could mean another thing in over seven languages she placed side by side. She had sent the documents to Dr Duru with a short note, “I have found a language whose roots have formed branches for many more.”

He had replied, ‘See me when you have time.”

She hadn’t found the time till now.

Dr Duru was already at the entrance when they got there. He was a sixty-year-old man, tall and a little bent after so many years of sitting at the desk and reconstructing languages. He was peering at them through his thick glasses that balanced at the tip of his nose. He stared at Nimrodi the same way she had done at the market, with awe and wonder.

Then, Nimrodi opened his mouth.

“Oboci, kama?” Are you well?

Dr Duru suddenly went still, like he had been poured a bowl of iced water. He took a few steps back and then turned to Yadili.

In all her years of working with him, Yadili had never seen that look of fear so etched on his face.

“Yadili...”

“Yes, it is true.”

He turned to Nimrodi again, tracing him from head to sandals, his eyes lingering on the coin he squeezed tightly in his palm.

“Come inside,” he said, turning to the door after he tried to collect himself.

They followed him.

The Department of Linguistics and African Language Studies occupied the ground floor of Akarandu Block, named after the English Studies and Linguistics scholar. In Dr Duru’s office, the walls were lined with framed photographs of rare words and hand-drawn phoneme charts from years of departmental research.

Nimrodi walked through the office slowly, running his hands across the wooden shelf that held books. He let his gaze rest on the framed photographs, walking through the journey of years of cultural documentation, and looking at the faces of the last speakers, the dates, and locations.  Three screens were running different database searches at the same time, a whiteboard was covered with words and letters, and in a corner, a two-seat sofa where Yadili had slept in more times than in her bed at home.

Nimrodi looked at the whiteboard, then turned to Dr Duru. Dr Duru looked at Yadili, who motioned to the marker. Dr Duru reached for the black marker, wiped the entire board clean, and handed the marker to Nimrodi.

He gestured to him, Go ahead.

He drew the lines first. Yadili and Dr Duru watched with bated breath as the image formed a tower. He took his time to map out the layerings and proportions, how the fourteen storeys connected. Then he drew the symbols that ran along its outside walls, spiralling inwards until it reached the apex. In their correct sequential order now, Yadili and Dr Duru could guess the name of the place.

Bab-Ilu, the Gate of God.

The Gate of God. Did such a place exist?

“What are these?” Yadili pointed to the round stones set in the bricks.

Ibishn, he replied, the unbreakable stone.

The tower, he explained, was built from something called ibishn, the toughest of elements during those times. It was a crystalline mineral composite embedded in every brick in precise places. It functioned as a piezoelectric stone that converted mechanical pressure into electrical charge and back again with a hundred per cent efficiency that no modern material had ever achieved. The entire tower, from the foundation to the apex, was one continuous piezoelectric system, four stories of interconnected transducer elements, each layer amplifying the effect of the one below it.

Yadili’s mouth hung open, unable to breathe. She turned to Dr Duru, who was tethered to every word Nimrodi uttered, following his hands and words to a place they were learning existed but might never see. The builders of Bab-Ilu discovered, whether by accident or divine genius, that time, like light, moves in quantifiable waves, and those waves carries energy. That energy could also be captured, refocused, and manipulated by a system tuned to correct the resonance frequency.

The tower was a chronon amplifier, a machine that focused temporal energy gathering from the ambient chronon field from the surrounding environment, concentrating it through the fourteen storeys and releasing it at the apex as a beam of focused temporal force.

The goal was to reach God by any means or reach the base frequency of creation. At that apex, they were searching for three things.

First, if the calculations were right, the tower would lock into the base frequency of the chronon field, the deepest vibration of time itself. Once locked in, the person could navigate time, the same way you use a remote control to check channels. Forward and backward, controlled from one point to the other.

Second was Eden. If it went backward enough, to the first coordinate or The Origin, you would arrive at the place the people of Bab-Ilu called, The First Footprint of God, the place where the rules of existence were still in their original form and the pinnacle of creation.

The third was God himself. At the point of maximum chronon concentration, the frequency of the tower’s output would cross a certain threshold matching the frequency of creation itself, and the barrier between the human world and whatever was on the other side would be permeable.

Yadili adjusted on her seat. She tried digesting everything she was hearing, squeezing it into every part of her brain. It was just too much. They were not building a temple or using prayers; they were building a transmitter powerful enough to reach the other side of existence.

Almost a century of mathematics, engineering, and collective faith had met at this very point, and it was almost working until the boundary pushed back.

Something went wrong.

Nimrodi spread his arms wide as his eyes sparked. The word he used for it was ogonf, fire or explosion. An engineering failure they had not planned for. They had been running the tower at increasing energy levels, pushing the chronon resonance amplitude higher and higher through the ibishn stones, and at a certain threshold, they had miscalculated, and the temporal beam at the apex had not held its coherence. It collapsed inward and rebounded outward.

There was an explosion of time, a chronon detonation, an omnidirectional pulse of raw energy moving outward through the fabric of time and space from the apex of the tower. Everyone standing within a four-thousand-meter radius had been temporarily displaced, and each person’s displacement was determined by their proximity to the apex. They didn’t die or get injured. They were scattered across the timeline like shards of glass. They were still intact but thrown in a different coordinate of time and space, each person speaking a language no one else alive had ever heard.

Nimrodi, who had been standing at the apex, had absorbed the full force of the beam and had been thrown the furthest, carrying the most chronon energy. He had arrived in 2050 in Onitsha, still saturated with that energy. The chronon energy had not dissipated. It was still in him, moving through his body the way ionising radiation moves through tissues, steady and slowly destructive.

When he was done, Yadili had her hands on her head in utter shock. Everywhere was silent. She looked closely at Nimrodi; he was not just telling his story, he was reliving every moment. His eyes, still fever-bright, were burning up now with so much passion. She picked up her pen, dropped it again, unsure of what to write.

“You are carrying the tower’s energy in your body, which means you are temporarily radioactive.”

Nimrodi could not understand it, so she slowly explained using her hands and some of the words she could put together.

Slowly, it came together, and his eyes flashed wide open.

“Do you know how long you have?”

He drew a circle on the board, then started wiping pieces of it, slowly from outside in.

He was dissolving. The chronon radiation was consuming him, destabilising his very existence in the present moment. In physics terms, he was a displaced particle trying to occupy a timeline that had no node for him. Without a return path or going back to his original coordinate, he would eventually fade away and cease to exist.

Before Dr Duru could stop her, she went forward and touched him as if he would disappear that very minute. She noticed he was already running a fever.

While they were still at the office, someone knocked on the door.

Yadili opened. These men were not police, and she couldn’t make out the words on their laminated identity cards as they flipped them up and down in her face. They were three in number, dressed in black.

“Miss Yadili Nnorom, National Security and Strategic Research Directorate. Our sources told us you have the man we are looking for. We would love to speak with your guest.”

Before Yadili could say anything, they pushed past her.

“He is not feeling too well, and it is dangerous to  take him. We are still trying to get some information from him.”

“We have doctors in our state-of-the-art facility. He will be fine.”

They moved forward and whisked the bewildered Nimrodi, who begged Yadili with his eyes not to let them take him.

Yadili was almost moved to tears.

“He doesn’t speak English or any language anybody understands. He is useless to you without me.”

They stared at her for some moments, weighing her words in their minds.

“We will call you when we need you, Miss Yadili. Do not leave town.”

Yadili turned to Nimrodi.

“Zụrụ. Blụọ ana ka, na-alogịi.” You will be fine. I will always be with you.

She followed them behind up to the black SUV, where Nimrodi threw her, one more helpless gaze before being ushered into the van.

“We have to go and keep him safe.” She told Dr Duru when she returned to the office.

Dr Duru did not answer her immediately; he had his hands in his pockets, staring out the window as the SUV drove out of the premises through the big campus gate.

“Sir?”

“Sure, sure,” he said, his eyes still on the gate. “Yes, of course.”

She got the call the next day while pacing up and down in her room, and checking the internet for any bits of the lost language Nimrodi was speaking.

“Miss Nnorom, we need you at the facility. 45 Boom Foundation Road.”

The building was white and bland when she got out of the taxi that brought her. At the gate, two elderly men peered at her ID closely for several minutes before she said, “I was called by the secretary to the Research and Education Minister.”

The receptionist directed her to the room. Six doors, a staircase going down one floor, then a narrower, quieter corridor, before she stopped at a big door,

Office of the Research and Education Minister.

She knocked once and entered.

The Minister was on a phone call when she entered, but as soon as he saw her, he concluded the call and turned to her. He looked a bit older than Dr Duru, with worry lines written on his forehead and a more serious look on his face.

“Welcome, Miss Nnorom. I have invited you here because of the strange man we received in our facility a few days ago. He hasn’t said a word since then. He has been drawing on the walls without chalk, and saying things we cannot understand.”

Yadili was nodding.

“Where is he?”

“I will show you.”

He waved his hands, and they got up and took the stairs down. The corridor was darker and colder than Yadili expected. The fluorescent bulbs flickered above them.

They stopped at a door. The Minister hesitated for a while before retrieving a keycard from his pocket  and swiping it on the lock. It beeped and the door opened.

Yadili gasped.

Every surface was covered. The walls, the floor, and even the lower portion of the ceiling where he was, were covered with dense geometric lines.  Some were wavy, some straight, others jagged. Symbols were written side by side with other strange symbols. It was a lot to take, and Yadili’s eyes were almost spinning. She recognised some words from the strange language, the letters she had spent days trying to transcribe.

Nimrodi was in a corner, his back to the wall, his knees drawn up, and his hands folded with the coin in them. He had lost weight since the last time they met. She could see it in the way his tunic now hung loosely and his collarbone jutted out. His skin, which had been deep brown when they met, looked a sickly muddy colour stripped of the luminescence, moisture, and warmth that struck her when she first set eyes on him.

He just stared into the space ahead. Yadili was not sure he had noticed her.

“Nimrodi,” she called softly.

He slowly turned his head towards her. The shimmer in his eyes was gone.

“Yadishi,” he replied.  

His voice was coarser than she remembered.

She crossed the room and crouched in front of him, placing her hands on his own.

The fever hit her immediately like she was close to an open flame.

She turned to the Minister, who was at the door.

“He is burning up badly. He needs a doctor.”

“He has seen so many doctors. Some of the best in the country. His blood work and blood pressure are normal. That is the strange thing, his temperature is off the charts, and he has been given every medication, but it is still high. We even brought the best physicists and biologists from the Universities across the country. We cannot understand him.”

She turned back to Nimrodi.

“That is because he is not supposed to be in this timeline. He is disintegrating quickly, and his body is filled with radioactive chronon energy. He is to be sent back to his timeline.”

“How do we do that?”

Yadili looked around.

“He will tell me. Give me some time with him with a whiteboard.”

The officers that manned his door brought a whiteboard and left them alone.

The Minister left too.

Yadili sat cross-legged on the floor in front of Nimrodi and handed him the marker.

He took the whiteboard and marker from her.

“Bab-Ilu,” he said and started drawing.

He drew slowly, his hands shaking from the fever.

The tower took shape, then beside it, a series of three concentric circles.

“What is this?” she asked.

“Hana,” he replied. Then he drew an arrow towards the tower.

“This is where you need to go.” She was nodding. “But we do not have the tower.”

He turned to look at the walls and everything he had drawn since he had been there. Yadili tried to make sense of the symbols before it finally dawned on her.

“That’s how  to construct the tower; the return calculations are all on these walls.”

She stood and turned slowly, reading the walls like she read words and writing down quickly in her notebook, stringing letters together, signs and sequences. Then she noticed something else.  In a separate section, there were seven stand-alone columns, each one darker than the last.

“Nimrodi, what is this?” she asked, pointing to the columns.

He slowly looked up.

“Ghovn.”

It translated to cascades, but cascades of what?

Nimrodi leaned back and closed his eyes. He looked too tired to talk more.

“Do you mean the Cascades that will happen when we keep you here longer?”

He raised his hands and showed her seven fingers.

“Ghovn ikshn”

She froze.

“The Seven Cascades. This is not good. We have to send him back.” She told the Minister when she returned to his office.

He brought down the glasses from his face.

“Why?”

“This country will suffer serious damage. Let us send this man back!”

He looked at her in the way one looks at someone talking gibberish after a serious bout of malaria.

“Leave now, Miss Nnorom.”

His face suddenly squeezed with intense seriousness.

“Get out!’ he pointed at the door.

At home, she called Dr Duru on the phone.

“It is bleak, sir.  With all I have seen and heard, we should be afraid.”

Dr Duru was quiet for a while.

“Let the government do its work, everything will be fine.”

Yadili still had that feeling of dread long after she had dropped the call.

She wasn’t sure everything would be fine.

A week later, the Niger turned red, the colour of oxygenated blood. The NIMET (National Meteorological and Environmental Telecast) confirmed that within forty-eight hours, the taps running in all houses and tanks gushed blood. They conducted tests, and there was no industrial contamination, no bloom of toxic species, and the water chemistry was normal. But the fish were dying, and the waters were still startling red.

Yadili was alarmed and frantic. She couldn’t sit still.

“I told them, Dr Duru. I told them. It is going to get worse.”

They were in the department going through some photographs Yadili had taken of Nimrodi’s room with the strange markers.

“You will fall sick, Yadili. Sit down.”

She pointed to a photograph. “Ghovn Drushn.” The blood waters. Nimrodi is not supposed to be here.  The timelines are detecting high amounts of chronon energy, and it will cause devastating consequences in our environment. It has already converted the Niger to a temporary discharge medium.”

The Second Cascade came the following week. Insects and bees swarmed the National Assembly Complex in Abuja. They came by night, and before morning, they flew out from all the crevices, and attacked the Members. These were not the local Nigerian honey bees. identifiable by the entomologists.

“I recognise the shape of their honeycomb.” Yadili was going through the circulating footage of the Speaker of the Assembly frantically waving his hands madly as he ran up the stairs trying to keep the bees away.

“From this point to this point, this is the shape of the tower Nimrodi described.”

She and Dr Duru exchanged confused glances.

The third sign was sickness. Ekola. The doctors from UNTH called it a haemorrhagic presentation with no identifiable pathogen. Patients bled from the ears, nose, and corners of the mouth. They cried out in so much pain. It was completely unresponsive to all medical interventions. The National Centre for Disease Control deployed their outbreak team, but there was nothing to respond to. There was no transmission vector, as it didn’t come from the bloody waters, and it wasn’t spread person to person. Nobody had seen anything like this.

By the fourth week, it had spread to ten additional States:  Kogi, Anambra, Delta, and Edo, with fifty confirmed cases.

Yadili was called to an emergency meeting with the Ministry of Education and Research.

“The chronon radiation is destabilising the local biological systems. First was the water, then insects, now human beings. The cellular haemorrhaging is chronon disintegration at the organic level.”

She showed them a picture of the seven columns Nimrodi had drawn.

“There are seven discharge columns. Each one is darker and larger than the one before it, affecting a wider radius and more complex systems.”

For the first time, she saw fear cloud the eyes of the Minister.

“So, what do you propose?”

“Send him back to his original temporal coordinate. We cannot filter, absorb, or redirect this energy. It will cook us.”

“I spoke with the Ministry of Science and Technology, and we don’t have that technology yet.”

“He has the knowledge inscribed on his walls. Use the equations.”

“But if we return him, we might be losing something valuable.”

“How many lives are you willing to sacrifice?  If you hold him long enough, the fourth and fifth Cascades will happen, and then there will be no Lagos, Abuja, or any facility to build anything. He is not an asset.”

The fourth sign was silence. Within a radius of ninety kilometres from the facility Nimrodi was held, all telecommunication infrastructure ceased to function for twelve hours. There was no signal anywhere. The phones were as useless as boxes. The mobile networks confirmed later that there was no logical explanation, and the signal waves had declined to propagate.

It was very scary. There was pandemonium; family members could not reach each other. The fact that a country as loud and noisy as Nigeria could retreat into silence by a strange force was alarming.

The government finally took Yadili’s advice and went to work to construct a resonance array, a geometrical arrangement of piezoelectric transducers set to the chronon resonance frequency of ibishn, positioned around Nimrodi’s body at the exact angles specified by the geometry calculations on the wall. They didn’t have the ibishn; instead, they used something close, a modern analogue, a barium titanite piezoelectric stone, synthesised to mimic the characteristics of the ibishn that Nimrodi had described.

The Head of Science and Technology, Dr Tanko, calculated the return coordinates. The twelve transducer units were arranged in double hexagonal patterns in a wide field in the North, close to the desert, and far away from where people lived, and in a week, it was set up. They ran it at night.

Nimrodi stood in the centre.  He looked paler than ever. His skin had turned golden yellow, and his tunic could hardly stay on his waist. He had barely had anything to eat and could only tolerate some white soup, bread and water.

Yadili stood at the boundary.

“Will this work?”

Dr Tanko sighed. “We hope so, we have done our best.”

Tears stung her eyes.

“Nimrodi,” she called. “Drushan Vrak. Goodbye”

He nodded tiredly.

“Power it.” Dr. Tanko began the ramp-up sequence.

20%— the air around them became thick.

40%— there was a sudden searing sound. Yadili covered her ears.

60%— the sound grew louder.

80%— Nimrodi began to glow.

“Full power!” The room went white.

It was not a flash but a sustained, bright, luminous glow. Suddenly, everything collapsed. Yadili looked up. She saw it. Bab-Ilu, the Gate of God. Nimrodi crossing time.

Then he was gone.

The array powered down.

All the writings on the wall in the room he was kept vanished. It was all gone, the drawings, the symbols, the letters disappeared. They had served their purpose.

The waters became clear, and the Ekola and bees went with him, too.

The nation found its voice again.

The fifth cascade never came.

The facility was decommissioned eight months after the return. The building was demolished, the land was sold.

The rubble was taken to a landfill outside Gwagwalada.

Two months later, the landfill workers reported that at night, in the section where that rubble had been deposited, the ground glowed faintly.

END.